Message in a Bottle
by Rhyolight04
Summary: Takes place after the events of Put My Heart in a Jar. Not the fluff. Kate's had a lot to process since that night in the helicopter hangar. She may even learn to wait for backup. How would you explain her mother's case in 3K words or fewer? & to whom


**A/N-** This isn't the fluff. I still hope there will be fluff, Meanwhile, I continue to try to make the whole arc into something I can understand and retcon in peace.

* * *

Kate found her team in the Old Haunt. They looked up, obviously relieved, when Kate appeared and took the empty seat next to Castle. "Deal me in."  
"After Esposito finishes cleaning me out," Rick said. She could tell he wanted more than a casual greeting, but Kate was tired from the drive and there were too many people around. She let her knee touch his, long enough to be deliberate.  
"You gave Agent Shaw the papers?" Lanie asked.  
"I did," Kate told him.  
"The most intelligent thing I have ever known the two of you to do," Lanie said. "And for once, that was a compliment."  
"It doesn't mean we've given up the case completely," Rick said.  
"Speak for yourself," Kate told him. "I thought we agreed."  
"If Deep Throat calls again —"  
"I thought he called himself Mr. Smith—" Lanie interrupted.  
"We'll discuss it then, all right?" said Kate. "Okay, play poker."  
Talking about her mother's case made Kate nervous. It wasn't just 'her mother's case' any more; it belonged to her mother's friends, to two retired cops, a prison guard, two dead hit-men and two more dead women younger than she was; above all, it was Montgomery's case. She thought it was Roy's death, more than anything else, that made it all right to find herself out of her depth. Desire for answers (cough revenge) in her mother's case was not as important as the strange new life she found herself in. The one he had died to try to give her.

"What did she say?" Rick asked, when they were alone that night. "You hadn't told her much on the phone, right?"  
"You have me seeing bugs and bots everywhere now. I wasn't going to say more on the phone than I had to. We were at at least two of those conferences together since she worked with us and she knows me well enough that she made it look very natural I would drop by when she was relatively close. But I think she was surprised it was something this big."

************************  
They were sitting in a park. It was traditional. It made it relatively hard to be overheard. "I brought you some more paperwork from the case you worked with us," Kate said, handing Shaw a manila folder. "There's a few other things in with it." _That's an understatement. My team's professional lives. More trust than I thought I had in anyone._ "And a thumb drive. Castle wants you to be really careful what machine you use to open it. He's worried about security."  
"How is Richard Castle? Still charming?" The FBI's most famous profiler looked at Kate, who felt herself turning red. "Hmm,"said Shaw. "Very charming, apparently. I'm so glad. You've had some terrible times at the 12th. I can't imagine what it must have been like, losing your captain and then nearly losing your own life at his funeral."  
"It's been tough, actually. I — it's been tough. Castle and I went through a bad patch. Mostly my fault."  
Shaw smiled at her. "I'm not sure I believe that. My own parents, when my mother had cancer— these aren't easy things, even if they're fairly common. Getting shot in the heart can't help but change you."  
"I hope so," Kate said. "I needed to change. That's why we're giving you these papers. They're everything we know — and a lot Castle thinks — about the people behind whoever shot me."  
"The gunman was never found, was he?"  
"No… We don't expect you to do anything about the information, but… the way things have gone in this case…" Shaw waited her out. "How much did you hear about Captain Montgomery's death?" Kate asked, finally.  
"Not much. I was surprised; usually a policeman shot doing his job gets more coverage, the press gets rabid and someone calls for a return to the death penalty."  
Kate's mouth was dry. She wasn't sure Castle had seen the problems when he'd blithely accepted her solution— to turn their lines of evidence in the tangled case over to someone else meant admitting she, Esposito, and Ryan had tangled them further. Lanie, too, was keeping their silence. "Jordan, I am putting everything I have in jeopardy here. There was a coverup. Those files have the truth."  
"You lied?"  
"Yeah. We lied a lot. The papers said Captain Montgomery was killed during a gang investigation, caught in the crossfire while he tried to protect an informant. The protecting part was true; but it was about some very bad cops from 20 years ago. They thought it would be a good idea to scare some of the Mafia straight. They'd kidnap them, and hold them for ransom, and they made a lot of money and a kind of temporary civic peace. But someone found out what they were doing and told them to give up their profits and he would keep their secret. Someone else has the money they extorted from criminals they kidnapped, and whoever he is, he's the one behind Roy's death. And a bunch of other murders, people who got too close at one time or another, or got in the way."  
"And someone else," Agent Shaw said, reading Kate's face, her stance. "Someone..?"  
"Did— did you know my mother was murdered, when I was 19?"  
"Oh, my dear. How awful— no, it isn't just what you're saying. What else?"  
_If I don't say any of this, it won't be true,_ Kate thought. She said, "He wasn't protecting an informant. He was protecting me. Roy, Captain Montgomery— when he was a rookie, he was part of the very bad cops, he was one of them, and an FBI agent got killed. It was Roy's gun. I think they got out of the game after that, but his friends—" _I hope it was your friends, Roy_ "—managed to pin the death on a mob guy. He went to prison. Somehow, of all the pro-bono lawyers in town, the mob guy got in touch with my mother, said he was guilty of a lot of things but not murdering a Federal agent. She was trying to clear him when she was killed." Kate paused for a moment. "Does this make any sense?"  
"It's not straightforward, but, yeah. Your captain and his friends were essentially bought out — well, they lost their money but they kept their jobs, their lives — by someone big, or someone who became big. Someone who found it important not to let the details of their extortion racket become public, important enough to silence someone who started to look too closely at one of their episodes. Right?"  
Kate nodded. "My mother and three of her students, almost thirteen years ago now. Raglan was one of the investigating officers, if you can call it that, in my mother's case, and he helped get it written off to gang activity." _Kind of a theme, it turns out,_ Kate thought. _I wonder why our story about Roy went down so easily._ "But Castle happened to find the records on her students and put the information about the way they were killed together. In a way that no one on the force had been allowed to? That no one had done before, anyway, and when a guy killed someone else with the same MO we thought we had a clue to follow up." _One whom Montgomery was awfully eager to shoot, but so was I…_ "That was a dead end. But every time I tried to pry into my mother's case I was attracting attention. And Roy made some kind of bargain to keep me safe. I wish he hadn't. I wished he'd taken whatever evidence he had against whoever it is got all the money, and according to Castle, who's used it to buy himself some power and some really excellent marksmen— I wish Roy had made him go down."  
"He didn't. He had reasons?"  
"He had a family," Kate said. "A grown son and two younger daughters, and a wife, and a home."  
"And a secret."  
"A big secret."  
"From what you're saying, Kate, and what you're not, I gather your captain didn't think you would win if you took this guy on yourself. Maybe he didn't think he would win, either, if he turned."  
"He said there are no victories, just places we stand and fight."  
"You don't believe that."  
"I haven't so far," Kate said.  
"This must have half-killed you, Kate. To find you were working with one of the men whose actions—"  
"Roy said he wasn't the one who killed my mother, and I believe him. He said that he hadn't been part of her death; so did Raglan, who had no reason to hide anything anymore. By the time my mother died, he had tried to put all his mistakes — his crimes— behind him. I don't like to think whether or not he was responsible for the — for her death getting written off as gang violence, but I have to believe he wasn't behind her death."  
Kate looked quickly at the other woman, and both of them knew she had indeed believed Montgomery's words — his dying words, within a couple of minutes. They knew Kate had to believe him, and they knew it was a fragile place for her peace to rest.  
Kate went on. "He never did me anything but good, and he never did anything but help us when we had a trail on her killer. Maybe he was willing to get caught by then, if it would stop this — this kingpin. The night he died he said he knew who was behind the killings, but it was too big for me and he was afraid I'd go after whoever it is and get myself killed. And it's almost killed me anyway to admit he was right." Kate swallowed. "Agent Shaw —"  
"You can call me Jordan, until I have to arrest you. And— as far as I can say now- I don't think arresting you would do any of us any good."  
"I don't think so, either," Kate said. "But if it comes down to uncovering what we did for Captain Montgomery, in order for you or someone to uncover whoever is still pulling triggers — if this guy really is messing in politics as well as murder — yeah, that's in there, too— my team and I will take whatever we have to."

She felt a little better now. Once she had decided to admit what they had done by making sure Montgomery was buried a hero the tension had been building, with the predictable consequences. It would be nice if the nightmares stopped again. "It's funny. I thought I was the good cop."  
"I think you are, Kate. You're certainly not the only officer who ever covered for a dead friend," Shaw said. "I'll understand more when I've seen what you've given me, here. Sometimes you do something wrong to make a greater good."  
"That's what Roy and Raglan and McCallister thought."  
"You said, I think — kidnapping and extortion?"  
"Putting the fear of God into some of the mob back then. I can see how that sounded good."  
"Oh, we all feel that way, don't we? Just sometimes, or if we're unlucky or unbalanced, maybe all the time? And having 'license to kill,' even if it's informal — it doesn't make me a more patient person. But we resist, Kate. You didn't profit from this coverup of yours, did you?"  
"Maybe his widow and kids —"  
"I don't think this is when you decide you're a bad cop. I think you're a better one because you pay attention."  
"It's hard to know sometimes. It's taken me a long time to see how many shades of gray there really are. I haven't liked it. I don't see how he could have lived this way."  
"If there's anything unusual about your captain, it's the direction of his arc. It takes extraordinary effort to bend away from shortcuts, from 'expedient justice,' if that's how those goons thought of themselves. Your captain was a hero, in the long quiet way, and from what you're telling me he proved it more than once."  
"I think he did. But when I look back at those two days, between Roy's being killed and my being shot — my guys didn't even discuss making Roy's death look like something it wasn't. We moved like we had planned for it years ago. We didn't have to change much, and there wasn't as much inquiry as there should have been. It might have been otherwise if the new captain had been more committed, if she had been anyone who had known Roy. If we hadn't been short of officers, if there wasn't—"  
"A war in the Mideast, a budget shortfall, a crisis in the stock market — you know that kind of 'if' doesn't lead anywhere."  
"I know. I think that was one of the reasons I stayed so far out of the loop while I was recovering. There was a lot I didn't want to look at." _Did I get Roy killed? Would he still be in the captain's office at the Twelfth if I hadn't meddled? If Castle hadn't? If Raglan hadn't come down with lymphoma and conscience?_  
"You're looking at it now. That's not insignificant. And you're taking risks for what you believe— and this time, that lines up with the law."  
"I thought I would never line up any other way." _I liked being naive._  
Shaw broke into Kate's introspection. "And Castle worries that your computers are insecure."  
"He worries about a lot of things being insecure. It makes sense — we don't know, for certain, if there were others who know what went down twenty years ago, although most of them are dead or retired. We don't know whether the Big Bad — that's what Castle calls the kingpin-type behind this, sorry."  
"I personally prefer a 'Buffy' reference over a Marvel Comics character, go on."  
"We don't know if he has informants in the police department. The operation they pulled off to free Lockwood was — I don't know what to say. Effective. Para-military. Very expensive. And someone knew just which prison guard to approach. We didn't have any good ideas until we thought of you."

"What are you going to do next?" Shaw asked, after a few minutes.  
"About this? Nothing, I hope. It's part of the peace agreement." Kate smiled a little. "The one between me and Castle."  
"That sounds like a good thing."  
"If no more loose ends turn up, there's not much I can do, anyway. But if you find anything out from your end, you'll let me know if I can help?"  
"If you can help, without getting killed, I will let you know. And — you may not ever hear anything else, you know, even if my people start digging. Or just a sentence or two."  
"I don't know anyone else whose hands I would rather leave it in," Kate told her.

*******************  
"So, she took it," Rick said. "And she's going to read it. And she's not all over you for concealing what really happened that night."  
"One bullet I have dodged. She thinks I'm still a good cop, she said."  
"I don't think you should doubt it."  
"I know, Rick, but one of us is supposed to have ethics."

_It's a good thing that's not me, Rick thought. But it's a very faint little bug on that thumb drive. More of a watermark. I just want to know if any of that information turns up somewhere. And it may not survive whatever protection the FBI uses._

And in another city, Jordan Shaw spoke on an encrypted line. "It's useful to know what they know. Not enough to cause you any trouble. No, certainly not worth bothering to do anything about. You're welcome, sir."


End file.
